Paintings and fugues

Dumitru Vonica, for as long as I remember him since the early 60s, painted every moment when he didn’t have to do something else, surrounded by music, with Bach’s fugues and Beethoven’s quartets foremost. Throughout his own experience as art lover, his search for structure, complexity, and subtle nuance stand out. He also admired energy and strength, especially in music and sculpture.

At the peak of his own creation, Dumitru Vonica used an underlying geometric mosaic of puzzle-like shapes as a scaffold for subsequent layers of paint, applied over broad surfaces, with an oil technique he developed that allowed all layers to remain visible. This game of independent, yet enmeshed layers might have been inspired by Bach’s contrapuntal music, or produced by the painter’s inner drive for complexity. Either way, he was intuitively aware that his work is a pictorial tribute to the master of the fugue.

Even his close friends and admirers were ignorant of his many years of quiet build-up, showcased for the first time here. Featured drawings and paintings cover the figurative 50s, the search for a medium and style in the 60s, and finally the mature, accomplished abstraction, which he refined to the end of his days.

An irrepressibly intense worker and perfectionist, Dumitru Vonica produced numerous works in each of the various styles presented here. Each of his creative periods has its special qualities, and its admirers among the few who saw them. For this reason, and to illustrate the long, tortuous road to maturity, earlier works have been included, even though the painter himself never wanted to exhibit anything but his final, multilayered style.